Homesite bug

There exists a horrible but known bug in Macromedia Homesite. We've known about it for a long time, but it got me again last night so I thought I'd mention it for all you old timers still using this editor.

When saving a file, if you either open a new document, or switch to another open document before that file is saved, bad things happen. The file you are saving looses it's content, and is saved to the content of the file you switched to.

So if you hit CTRL-S, then hit CTRL-N to start a new document before it's done saving, the file you are saving will be blank.

Last night, this caused me some irritation. I was working on a tiny FUsebox application. Here's a simplied switch:

As you can see, an email form submits and then two CFML templates are executed - act_send (sends and email message) and dsp_sent (displays a "Sent" message).

I was editing the dsp_sent.cfm file last night over RDS in Homesite. I hit CTRL-S, then quickly switched to the switch file listed above. This resulted in dsp_sent.cfm being saved with the contents of the switch code instead.

I realized something was wrong when I had 700 messages coming in to my inbox. I quickly fixed the problem, but I still got 10,000 email messages in my inbox. It's funny because it didn't happen to you.